Schools have been forced to send year groups home this week because of “rapidly rising” Covid rates among staff and an inability to find supply teachers, it has emerged.
The removal of the need for Covid testing among staff and pupils was making the situation worse, with some schools now experiencing their worst absence levels of the pandemic, a headteachers’ leader told Tes.
Heads warn that some schools are having to send year groups home on a rota or combine class groups in an attempt to protect exam year groups from more disruption.
And supply agencies are reporting difficulties in satisfying the high demand for cover in schools - with some teachers said to be opting to deliver tuition sessions through the National Tutoring Programme or privately instead.
Caroline Derbyshire, chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable group and trust leader for Saffron Academy Trust, in Essex, said that across her multi-academy trust more staff had been off with Covid in the past two months than in the previous two years of the pandemic.
Covid: Schools facing severe disruption
Around one in five of the trust’s 1,100 staff have been off with Covid since 22 January, with more than 50 off with the virus on one day this week.
She said: “Clearly, removing compulsory testing and self-isolation has had an impact, without doubt.”
The end of regular testing of staff and students in secondary schools was announced by prime minister Boris Johnson last month.
Ms Derbyshire said the trust had already “exhausted” the option of filling staffing gaps with supply teachers.
“We’ve now got to the stage where we’re rotating year groups out, and that’s not uncommon from other schools I’ve spoken to,” she said.
“We can’t get enough supply to keep the school open. We have got one year group at home all this week. We are rotating this and trying to protect exam year groups.
‘We can’t get enough supply to keep the school open’
“We have got an exam season this year, so the impact of having your teacher even replaced by a supply teacher is significant.
“Obviously, schools will do their utmost to make sure that they get qualified subject teachers, subject specialists in front of children who are preparing for exams...but this cannot be described as an undisrupted period.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the union was getting “worrying reports” of “rapidly rising” Covid cases in schools among both pupils and staff.
There have been widespread reports of schools moving classes or year groups online across the country because of Covid, including in Cumbria, East Yorkshire, Essex, Gloucestershire, Sussex, Somerset and Wiltshire.
And data from the FFT Education Datalab’s attendance tracker shows that absence was up in both primary and secondary schools last week compared with the week before.
Absence increased from 5 per cent to 6.4 per cent among primary pupils and from 7.9 per cent to 8.8 per cent in secondary.
Mr Barton said: “The government seems to have largely drawn a line under the pandemic and moved on but the evidence coming from our schools and colleges is that business is still very far from being back to normal.
“This is a worry, given many students face important exams in just a few weeks’ time.”
Mr Barton said some schools were reporting having to prioritise their GCSE and A-level students, and were doing so by amalgamating classes.
“Sending home year groups is an option that schools and colleges will resist taking but may have to consider if staffing problems continue to grow,” he added.
Vic Goddard, co-principal of Passmores Academy in Essex, which is part of a trust of four schools, said the absence rate among staff ranged from 20 to 40 per cent
”I think the problem we have is staff are continuing to test...and there’s been a massive drop-off in students taking testing kits,” he said.
“The impact of staff not being available in the school is there is no great plethora of cover teachers out there in the world.”
He told Tes that being a middle leader was now the “toughest job in education because you’re probably going to end up having to write cover work for a variety of people and your workload hasn’t diminished”.
“We’re running ourselves into the ground and I can see some really stressed, tired staff around me who are battling to get through because their colleagues can’t come in.
“And I just worry about the wall we’re going to run into at the end of this and how ill people are going to be and how many I’m going to lose because they’ve had enough of teaching.”
Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union said: “While the last few weeks of attendance data from the government has shown improvements, we are very clear that we’re not out of the woods yet.
“National numbers can hide big variations locally and some areas do seem to be harder hit. Anecdotally we are hearing from our members that many schools are still experiencing disruption due to Covid, both with staffing and pupil absences. We need to watch the next few weeks very carefully.”
Mr Barton and Ms Derbyshire both warned that the situation will get worse once the public’s access to free Covid tests comes to an end at the start of next month.
Mr Barton said: “Staff and pupils will continue to have access to Covid tests until the end of March and are therefore able to check whether any potential Covid symptoms are actually Covid, and isolate if so.
“The worry is that, once free testing stops, as the government is currently planning, the number of students and staff coming into classrooms with Covid could increase even further, and lead to even more disruption to education.”
The ASCL was among a group of organisations that wrote to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi urging him to keep Covid tests free of charge to avoid further disruption to this summer’s exams.
Mr Barton added: “There is still a real problem with coronavirus in our schools and colleges that the government must not ignore.
“Testing is one of the few tools we still have to reduce transmission among students and staff, and the government must reverse its decision and continue to provide free tests to people working or studying in education settings beyond the end of March and for the foreseeable future.”
But it told Tes today that it does not have a numerical threshold for what constitutes a Covid outbreak.
Supply teacher agencies in the South of England are also reporting difficulties in ensuring that Covid absences in schools are filled.
Simone Payne, chief executive of 4my schools, which operates in the South East, said: “The dynamics of emergency supply have changed.
“Some of that is because although the government would like to think that we’re moving away from the pandemic, it feels like we’ve got as many people with Covid as we did a few months ago.
“I think schools are faced with this terrible situation where they have massive staff shortages, just as much as they have done over the last two years with so many people having Covid. Schools still need help.
‘Schools are faced with this terrible situation where they have massive staff shortages’
“There are some supply teachers who covered classes previously who are opting to do tutoring or 1-1 tuition at the moment. There are a lot of reasons for that: some of it is about how they feel going into schools and stress levels, as well as wanting to support pupils who have fallen the most behind.”
She said that across supply agencies, they were finding that some potential teaching staff were unavailable because they were either working on the National Tutoring Programme or delivering other tuition sessions.
Schools minister Robin Walker was warned this week at a meeting of the Commons Education Select Committee that schools in some parts of the country are “fishing in the same pond” for both supply staff to cover Covid absences and people to deliver catch-up tuition sessions through the NTP.
Samantha Bullimore, a manager for Masterclass Education in Sussex, said: “The current situation across schools in the local area is quite tricky.
“On a daily basis, schools are contacting us from far and wide in the hope that we can help them with supply teachers both for the day and on a long-term basis, and also for support staff. Without these, schools are having to close classes and parts of the school.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: “We are now moving to living with - and managing - the virus, while maintaining the population’s wall of protection and communicating safer behaviours that the public can follow to manage risk.
“Our latest workforce absence data estimates that 1.3 per cent of school staff were absent for Covid-19 related reasons.”
You need a Tes subscription to read this article
Subscribe now to read this article and get other subscriber-only content:
